Tag: Year in Film

Do you guys remember how much we heard around summertime about 2016 being a particularly dire year for movies? While it's always possible that the movie year simply started to look a lot better once the real-life year started to really crater in early November, there was also a crush of fall releases that saved one kind of cultural face even as the US went bonkers. These are the ten I liked best; trust...

Aferim!
Packed to the rafters with florid insults and colorful ethnic slurs, Radu Jude’s rambling black-comic Western, in which a lawman and his son strike out in search of a runaway slave in 1830s Romania, takes a hard look at the scourge of intolerance—and how it gets passed on from one generation to the next.
Chevalier
Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s absurdist chamber piece, a close-quarters study of masculine competition and conceitedness in the age of the...

Editor’s Note: A Face in the Crowd, Idiocracy and The Manchurian Candidate were to this list as Isabelle Huppert was to the Best Performances list. What art isn’t “more relevant than ever” right now? When the world presses in, too oppressively to ignore, one comfort is that art is already there to meet it.
Keep up with all of our Year in Film features here.
Being There
A dimwit whose knowledge is derived solely from television and...

Keep up with all of our Year in Film features here.
20th Century Women ("Don't Worry About the Government")
The statement feels downright laughable in this hellish year, but in Mike Mills's late-70s coming of age story, the Talking Heads song is used to memorable effect. The song, from the band's debut album, has a stripped down, sing-song earnestness (an authentic quirkiness) that fits perfectly with Mills's uncertain, creative band of protagonists. Abbey Bender
Elle (“Lust...